BENGALURU - Dell’s new research division, created 18 months ago in the US and supports all four of its business units, is now expanding its presence to India. The $62-billion PC-maker already has a sizeable research and development presence in the country with a pool of 2,500 engineers in Bengaluru and Chennai, and has produced 120 patents to date. Jai Menon, Vice-President and Chief Research Officer, Dell,

who is visiting India to set up a research team in Bengaluru and Chennai said Business Line reported. Menon’s research group in California and Texas has adopted an open innovation model wherein it collaborates and co-innovates with customers, start-ups, universities, partners and its internal R&D teams. “We have signed an MoU with IIT Chennai where a small team of three-four engineers from Dell will work on the next version of our High Velocity Cloud project, along with a professor and three students from IIT Chennai. We are working on a similar MoU in Bengaluru, where we are considering partnering with Indian Institute of Science and NIT Suratkal with a small team of seven-eight people in server systems software, systems management and software defined data centres,” he said.In 18 months, Menon’s team has already created one new product – OpenGENI Rack, targeted at university and research communities, which allows them the flexibility of playing around with networking algorithms in a particular area and invent new protocols. The team has also created a new business for Dell – High Velocity Cloud that helps increase the speed and service delivery of telcos.“We plan to start small in India and once the two projects in Chennai and Bengaluru are complete, we will assess the progress and decide on further expansion, either by hiring or by using our internal resources,” he said.